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Chantal Zakari is a Turkish-Levantine artist and a recent U.S. citizen. She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she was trained as a designer and an artist. She published The Turk & The Jew, in 1998 with Mike Mandel, a book based on the web-narrative by the same title, which was launched in 1996. In 2005, using a pseudonym, she self-published webAffairs, a documentary of a web community. From 1997 to 2010, in collaboration with Mandel she co-wrote, photographed and designed The State of Ata: The Contested Imagery of Power in Turkey, a visual book about the social themes that define contemporary Turkey and that specifically examines the imagery of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, its revolutionary leader after WWI. Historian and author Etienne Copeaux, defined the book as "an encyclopedic research of the semiology of power relationships in Turkey".

She has had solo shows of her work in the U.S. and in Turkey and her books are in the collection of Brooklyn Museum of Art, Yale University, Institute of network Cultures, Getty Research Institute, The Kinsey Institute Library and many private collections. She has given book readings in the form of performances in the U.K., Netherlands, Canada, Turkey and the U.S.

Zakari is a professor in the Text and Image Arts Area at The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.